The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana Page A

lessons and all that playing go to waste. One afternoon she grabbed me and said, “
Mijo,
come here—we’re going to the park.”
    “What? Where?”
    “You’ll see.” Oh, okay. Here we go again.
    I could hear the music even before we got there. It was a boogie kind of beat and echo, echo, echo—just bouncing off the buildings and trees. We walked into the park, and I saw a band doing its thing with funky amplifiers and electric guitars and a booming bass sound. They were playing a riff-blues number like “Last Night,” and then this one guitarist stepped up, and he’s wearing khakis, pressed sharp as a knife, and his hair was piled up in a big mop and cut close on the sides, like Little Richard’s. Real pachuco style, just like my dad hated. The guy starts soloing, and he’s got a very distinctive twang on his guitar that was popular back then—like Duane Eddy or Lonnie Mack.
    It was like a UFO had landed in my backyard. I had seen guitarists on TV before, but not like this—hearing it live made the hair on my arms go straight up. This was so different—to see it happening in front of me, to see someone snapping the strings and feel the sound going through you. To see how the music was made. I’m sure my mom could see the effect on me just by looking at my eyes and my body. I stood there and listened and couldn’t move.
    It was Javier Bátiz. He was one of the few guys playing that early style of rock and roll in Mexico at the time. He had come up playing with a black American singer and piano player from New Orleans named Gene Ross, who lived in Tijuana. Now he was leading his own group called Los TJs—short for “Tijuanenses.” And it waspronounced “Tee-Jays,” not “Tay-hotas,” because we all wanted to be in with the in crowd, as American as possible. That group had some of the best players in Tijuana, including Javier’s sister. They called her Baby Bátiz because she sang “Angel Baby” so well.
    Javier himself was one of Tijuana’s baddest guitarists, and his home gig was at El Convoy—a dance and strip club on Avenida Revolución. He was an amalgam of the three people he loved most: B. B. King, Little Richard, and Ray Charles. He had it down. But he didn’t sound like a parrot. He had really invested a lot of his own energy and passion into it.
    Of course I didn’t know all this about Javier or the other musicians and their styles and fingerprints then. I didn’t even know Javier’s name. Not yet. All this made it more mysterious and attractive to me. What I could see was that it was not just the sound or the look of the band or the way they presented themselves. It was all that together. And I knew that this was not the kind of music that happened in that park too often. I’m not sure how they got the permit to play that loud outdoors, but there they were.
    I remember thinking, with all my teenage conviction, “This is what I want to be. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
    Two things happened right away because of what happened in the park that day. First, I started following Javier around—I became his shadow. I was thirteen at the time; he was only three or four years older than I was, but in my eyes he might as well have been in his early twenties. He wasn’t overly friendly or anything to me, but he let me come and hang out at his place. He lived with his mother, and the first time I went to his place I noticed that everything smelled like glue because he was into model cars. His piano was covered with them! Wow. It was cars and records and guitars and music, and that was this guy’s life—which made him the coolest guy around.
    Another thing about Javier was that his mannerisms were so different from anything I had ever seen—it was definitely not mariachi, and it wasn’t pachuco, either. There was nothing Mexican about his thing. It was a black American kind of charisma. Hewas a slick dresser, and he had swagger and confidence, even in the way he